Research Papers

Large foundation models (LFMs) transform healthcare AI in prevention, diagnostics, and treatment. However, whether LFMs can provide truly personalized treatment recommendations remains an open question. Recent research has revealed multiple challenges for personalization, including the fundamental generalizability paradox: models achieving high accuracy in one clinical study perform at chance level in others, demonstrating that personalization and external validity exist in tension. This exemplifies broader contradictions in AI-driven healthcare: the privacy-performance paradox, scale-specificity paradox, and the automation-empathy paradox. As another challenge, the degree of causal understanding required for personalized recommendations, as opposed to mere predictive capacities of LFMs, remains an open question. N-of-1 trials -- crossover self-experiments and the gold standard for individual causal inference in personalized medicine -- resolve these tensions by providing within-person causal evidence while preserving privacy through local experimentation. Despite their impressive capabilities, this paper argues that LFMs cannot replace N-of-1 trials. We argue that LFMs and N-of-1 trials are complementary: LFMs excel at rapid hypothesis generation from population patterns using multimodal data, while N-of-1 trials excel at causal validation for a given individual. We propose a hybrid framework that combines the strengths of both to enable personalization and navigate the identified paradoxes: LFMs generate ranked intervention candidates with uncertainty estimates, which trigger subsequent N-of-1 trials. Clarifying the boundary between prediction and causation and explicitly addressing the paradoxical tensions are essential for responsible AI integration in personalized medicine.

We propose an approach to model articles of the Italian Criminal Code (ICC), using Answer Set Programming (ASP), and to semi-automatically learn legal rules from examples based on prior judicial decisions. The developed tool is intended to support legal experts during the criminal trial phase by providing reasoning and possible legal outcomes. The methodology involves analyzing and encoding articles of the ICC in ASP, including "crimes against the person" and property offenses. The resulting model is validated on a set of previous verdicts and refined as necessary. During the encoding process, contradictions may arise; these are properly handled by the system, which also generates possible decisions for new cases and provides explanations through a tool that leverages the "supportedness" of stable models. The automatic explainability offered by the tool can also be used to clarify the logic behind judicial decisions, making the decision-making process more interpretable. Furthermore, the tool integrates an inductive logic programming system for ASP, which is employed to generalize legal rules from case examples.

Deep neural networks have accelerated inverse-kinematics (IK) inference to the point where low cost manipulators can execute complex trajectories in real time, yet the opaque nature of these models contradicts the transparency and safety requirements emerging in responsible AI regulation. This study proposes an explainability centered workflow that integrates Shapley-value attribution with physics-based obstacle avoidance evaluation for the ROBOTIS OpenManipulator-X. Building upon the original IKNet, two lightweight variants-Improved IKNet with residual connections and Focused IKNet with position-orientation decoupling are trained on a large, synthetically generated pose-joint dataset. SHAP is employed to derive both global and local importance rankings, while the InterpretML toolkit visualizes partial-dependence patterns that expose non-linear couplings between Cartesian poses and joint angles. To bridge algorithmic insight and robotic safety, each network is embedded in a simulator that subjects the arm to randomized single and multi-obstacle scenes; forward kinematics, capsule-based collision checks, and trajectory metrics quantify the relationship between attribution balance and physical clearance. Qualitative heat maps reveal that architectures distributing importance more evenly across pose dimensions tend to maintain wider safety margins without compromising positional accuracy. The combined analysis demonstrates that explainable AI(XAI) techniques can illuminate hidden failure modes, guide architectural refinements, and inform obstacle aware deployment strategies for learning based IK. The proposed methodology thus contributes a concrete path toward trustworthy, data-driven manipulation that aligns with emerging responsible-AI standards.

Fairness in algorithmic decision-making is often framed in terms of individual fairness, which requires that similar individuals receive similar outcomes. A system violates individual fairness if there exists a pair of inputs differing only in protected attributes (such as race or gender) that lead to significantly different outcomes-for example, one favorable and the other unfavorable. While this notion highlights isolated instances of unfairness, it fails to capture broader patterns of systematic or clustered discrimination that may affect entire subgroups. We introduce and motivate the concept of discrimination clustering, a generalization of individual fairness violations. Rather than detecting single counterfactual disparities, we seek to uncover regions of the input space where small perturbations in protected features lead to k-significantly distinct clusters of outcomes. That is, for a given input, we identify a local neighborhood-differing only in protected attributes-whose members' outputs separate into many distinct clusters. These clusters reveal significant arbitrariness in treatment solely based on protected attributes that help expose patterns of algorithmic bias that elude pairwise fairness checks. We present HyFair, a hybrid technique that combines formal symbolic analysis (via SMT and MILP solvers) to certify individual fairness with randomized search to discover discriminatory clusters. This combination enables both formal guarantees-when no counterexamples exist-and the detection of severe violations that are computationally challenging for symbolic methods alone. Given a set of inputs exhibiting high k-unfairness, we introduce a novel explanation method to generate interpretable, decision-tree-style artifacts. Our experiments demonstrate that HyFair outperforms state-of-the-art fairness verification and local explanation methods.

Modern AI systems rely on vector embeddings stored and searched using floating-point arithmetic. While effective for approximate similarity search, this design introduces fundamental non-determinism: identical models, inputs, and code can produce different memory states and retrieval results across hardware architectures (e.g., x86 vs. ARM). This prevents replayability and safe deployment, leading to silent data divergence that prevents post-hoc verification and compromises audit trails in regulated sectors. We present Valori, a deterministic AI memory substrate that replaces floating-point memory operations with fixed-point arithmetic (Q16.16) and models memory as a replayable state machine. Valori guarantees bit-identical memory states, snapshots, and search results across platforms. We demonstrate that non-determinism arises before indexing or retrieval and show how Valori enforces determinism at the memory boundary. Our results suggest that deterministic memory is a necessary primitive for trustworthy AI systems. The reference implementation is open-source and available at https://github.com/varshith-Git/Valori-Kernel (archived at https://zenodo.org/records/18022660).

Shrimp is one of the most widely consumed aquatic species globally, valued for both its nutritional content and economic importance. Shrimp farming represents a significant source of income in many regions; however, like other forms of aquaculture, it is severely impacted by disease outbreaks. These diseases pose a major challenge to sustainable shrimp production. To address this issue, automated disease classification methods can offer timely and accurate detection. This research proposes a deep learning-based approach for the automated classification of shrimp diseases. A dataset comprising 1,149 images across four disease classes was utilized. Six pretrained deep learning models, ResNet50, EfficientNet, DenseNet201, MobileNet, ConvNeXt-Tiny, and Xception were deployed and evaluated for performance. The images background was removed, followed by standardized preprocessing through the Keras image pipeline. Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) was used for enhancing the model robustness through adversarial training. While advanced augmentation strategies, including CutMix and MixUp, were implemented to mitigate overfitting and improve generalization. To support interpretability, and to visualize regions of model attention, post-hoc explanation methods such as Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, and XGrad-CAM were applied. Exploratory results demonstrated that ConvNeXt-Tiny achieved the highest performance, attaining a 96.88% accuracy on the test dataset. After 1000 iterations, the 99% confidence interval for the model is [0.953,0.971].

The accurate classification of gastrointestinal diseases from endoscopic and histopathological imagery remains a significant challenge in medical diagnostics, mainly due to the vast data volume and subtle variation in inter-class visuals. This study presents a hybrid dual-stream deep learning framework built on teacher-student knowledge distillation, where a high-capacity teacher model integrates the global contextual reasoning of a Swin Transformer with the local fine-grained feature extraction of a Vision Transformer. The student network was implemented as a compact Tiny-ViT structure that inherits the teacher's semantic and morphological knowledge via soft-label distillation, achieving a balance between efficiency and diagnostic accuracy. Two carefully curated Wireless Capsule Endoscopy datasets, encompassing major GI disease classes, were employed to ensure balanced representation and prevent inter-sample bias. The proposed framework achieved remarkable performance with accuracies of 0.9978 and 0.9928 on Dataset 1 and Dataset 2 respectively, and an average AUC of 1.0000, signifying near-perfect discriminative capability. Interpretability analyses using Grad-CAM, LIME, and Score-CAM confirmed that the model's predictions were grounded in clinically significant tissue regions and pathologically relevant morphological cues, validating the framework's transparency and reliability. The Tiny-ViT demonstrated diagnostic performance with reduced computational complexity comparable to its transformer-based teacher while delivering faster inference, making it suitable for resource-constrained clinical environments. Overall, the proposed framework provides a robust, interpretable, and scalable solution for AI-assisted GI disease diagnosis, paving the way toward future intelligent endoscopic screening that is compatible with clinical practicality.

Hyperparameters tuning is a fundamental, yet computationally expensive, step in optimizing machine learning models. Beyond optimization, understanding the relative importance and interaction of hyperparameters is critical to efficient model development. In this paper, we introduce MetaSHAP, a scalable semi-automated eXplainable AI (XAI) method, that uses meta-learning and Shapley values analysis to provide actionable and dataset-aware tuning insights. MetaSHAP operates over a vast benchmark of over 09 millions evaluated machine learning pipelines, allowing it to produce interpretable importance scores and actionable tuning insights that reveal how much each hyperparameter matters, how it interacts with others and in which value ranges its influence is concentrated. For a given algorithm and dataset, MetaSHAP learns a surrogate performance model from historical configurations, computes hyperparameters interactions using SHAP-based analysis, and derives interpretable tuning ranges from the most influential hyperparameters. This allows practitioners not only to prioritize which hyperparameters to tune, but also to understand their directionality and interactions. We empirically validate MetaSHAP on a diverse benchmark of 164 classification datasets and 14 classifiers, demonstrating that it produces reliable importance rankings and competitive performance when used to guide Bayesian optimization.

Malaria remains a prevalent health concern in regions with tropical and subtropical climates. The cause of malaria is the Plasmodium parasite, which is transmitted through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes. Traditional diagnostic methods, such as microscopic blood smear analysis, are low in sensitivity, depend on expert judgment, and require resources that may not be available in remote settings. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a deep learning-based approach utilizing a custom Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to automatically classify blood cell images as parasitized or uninfected. The model achieves an accuracy of 96%, with precision and recall scores exceeding 0.95 for both classes. This study also compares the custom CNN with established deep learning architectures, including ResNet50, VGG16, MobileNetV2, and DenseNet121. To enhance model interpretability, Explainable AI techniques such as SHAP, LIME, and Saliency Maps are applied. The proposed system shows how deep learning can provide quick, accurate and understandable malaria diagnosis, especially in areas with limited resources.

Healthcare systems around the world are grappling with issues such as inefficient diagnostics, rising costs, and limited access to specialists. These challenges often contribute to delays in treatment and poorer health outcomes. Most existing AI and deep learning based health assessment systems offer limited interactivity and transparency, reducing their usefulness for user-centered health support. This research introduces a conversational chatbot powered by a Large Language Model (LLM), using GPT-4o, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and explainable AI techniques. The chatbot engages users in a dynamic conversation to extract and normalize symptoms while identifying and ranking potential health conditions through similarity matching and adaptive questioning. Using Chain-of-Thought prompting, the system also provides more transparent explanations of its reasoning process. When evaluated against traditional machine learning models, including Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, SVM, Random Forest, and KNN using both TF-IDF and CountVectorizer feature extraction, the proposed LLM-based system achieved a Top-1 accuracy of 90% and a Top-3 accuracy of 100%. The system was additionally evaluated through a cross-sectional expert evaluation involving 17 physicians across all 14 conditions, with the results indicating generally favorable assessments of conversational quality, early diagnostic plausibility, and safety-related criteria. These findings demonstrate the potential of explainable conversational AI as a health and well-being support tool for early symptom assessment. However, the proposed system is not intended for clinical diagnosis or clinical decision-making, and further validation would be required before any use in healthcare practice.

Virtual testing using synthetic data has become a cornerstone of autonomous vehicle (AV) safety assurance. Despite progress in improving visual realism through advanced simulators and generative AI, recent studies reveal that pixel-level fidelity alone does not ensure reliable transfer from simulation to the real world. What truly matters is whether the system-under-test (SUT) bases its decisions on consistent decision evidence in both real and simulated environments, not just whether images "look real" to humans. To this end this paper proposes a behavior-grounded fidelity measure by introducing Decisive Feature Fidelity (DFF), a new SUT-specific metric that extends the existing fidelity spectrum to capture mechanism parity, that is, agreement in the model-specific decisive evidence that drives the SUT's decisions across domains. DFF leverages explainable-AI methods to identify and compare the decisive features driving the SUT's outputs for matched real-synthetic pairs. We further propose estimators based on counterfactual explanations, along with a DFF-guided calibration scheme to enhance simulator fidelity. Experiments on 2126 matched KITTI-VirtualKITTI2 pairs demonstrate that DFF reveals discrepancies overlooked by conventional output-value fidelity. Furthermore, results show that DFF-guided calibration improves decisive-feature and input-level fidelity without sacrificing output value fidelity across diverse SUTs.

Impacts of Racial Bias in Historical Training Data for News AI

Rahul Bhargava, Malene Hornstrup Jespersen, Emily Boardman Ndulue +1

AI technologies have rapidly moved into business and research applications that involve large text corpora, including computational journalism research and newsroom settings. These models, trained on extant data from various sources, can be conceptualized as historical artifacts that encode decades-old attitudes and stereotypes. This paper investigates one such example trained on the broadly-used New York Times Annotated Corpus to create a multi-label classifier. Our use in research settings surfaced the concerning "blacks" thematic topic label. Through quantitative and qualitative means we investigate this label's use in the training corpus, what concepts it might be encoding in the trained classifier, and how those concepts impact our model use. Via the application of explainable AI methods, we find that the "blacks" label operates partially as a general "racism detector" across some minoritized groups. However, it performs poorly against expectations on modern examples such as COVID-19 era anti-Asian hate stories, and reporting on the Black Lives Matter movement. This case study of interrogating embedded biases in a model reveals how similar applications in newsroom settings can lead to unexpected outputs that could impact a wide variety of potential uses of any large language model-story discovery, audience targeting, summarization, etc. The fundamental tension this exposes for newsrooms is how to adopt AI-enabled workflow tools while reducing the risk of reproducing historical biases in news coverage.